In Space, They're Waiting For Me
by OrbitZero
Summary: AU in which No Name never makes it out to space, Trowa Barton is never killed, and Operation Meteor is a success-or a disaster, for those on Earth. Like No Name, who ekes out a meager living in the wasteland. Things might change when he drags an unconscious soldier from a battlefield only to find he may have recovered one of the reviled Gundam pilots.
1. Chapter 1

He took in the scene as best he could from behind thick lenses and the ever present ash and dust in the air. The scorch marks in the street and dead grass and crumbling buildings told him that one of these suits-probably the weird one-had some kind of thermal weapon. All the pockmarks told him that a _lot_ of suits had been required to take the weird one down. That was probably who the fight was with, Alliance Leos against the weird one. The scattered pieces of the Leos were all over, and he wondered if there had even been more at the start of the fight, before the thermal weapon would've atomized them.

None of the Leos were salvageable. There were parts, yeah, but he'd need a truck to tow them away. He was saving the fuel he had left for emergencies. Until he found more, anyway. Probably someone else would get to the scraps before him, so he wasn't terribly concerned about it. It was a bit of a surprise to see this here at all, really, but he knew it meant at least one thing: he wasn't biking any further. Not with the cement all gouged and split and cracked. He let the bike coast to a stop beside a Leo's dismembered arms. He locked his bike to the wrist joint and tightened the tarp down over the small cart attached to the bike. A glance behind him showed only crumbling buildings, grey skies, and hazy air. The only noise was in his own head-his gum squelching slightly as he chewed it. Cigarettes were a lot harder to come by than boxes of nicotine gum and a fix was a fix. Nothing moved in the street, and he continued into the battlefield.

He couldn't place when it'd happened. He'd been used to the sound of gunfire and the heavy, rumbling thuds of mobile suits on the ground for as long as he could remember. A battle so far away from where he slept wasn't likely to wake him. If it'd been closer, he'd probably have heard it. Didn't want to end up crushed under the weight of these suits, after all.

On his left, he looked over the torso of a Leo. Something had sliced clean through it. He crouched briefly to touch a hardened glob of metal on the ground, something that had probably dripped from the Leo while it was still molten from the blow. It was a little warm. The hatch was half open, so he climbed to it. Charred corpse at the controls. He reached in for the standard issue pistol he knew all of the Alliance troops carried. He let the clip fall into his palm, counted off the number of rounds, and added it to his inventory back home before pressing the clip back into place. Battle must've been recent enough that no one else had gotten to it, otherwise the gun-and the soldier's boots-wouldn't still be there.

The next Leo was nearly whole save that the entire cockpit was missing. Just a gaping emptiness where it'd been. That death probably would've been quick, at least. There was another body just beyond the Leo, and he kept his distance for a moment, studying the exposed back for movement. His eyes drifted to another mangled Leo whose cockpit was open. Stepping closer to the man, he kept the stolen gun trained at about eye level before nudging him with the toe of his boot. Nothing. He rolled the man over with his foot. The ground under the body was coated in dark blood, and the front of the olive uniform was turned a nasty brown. He wrenched the pistol from the dead man's hand, popped out the clip, counted bullets, and slid it into his back pocket. He dropped the gun back down onto the man's body and it landed with a muffled clatter.

Now he stared up at the weird suit. White and blue with yellow detailing. A bright red shield. All these bullet holes in the ground and nearby buildings, but none on this thing. He knocked on the metal and it even rang differently in the air. He decided there were a few more possibilities as to what this was than an antagonist to these Leos. Maybe it had been a new Alliance suit, and it, along with its comrades here, had been taken out by an enemy. Or it was an OZ suit. They were churning out new suits all the time, according to whatever small bit of radio broadcast he managed to pick up. The Alliance troops and the OZ soldier could have taken each other out. Then he had to consider the non-Earth forces. It could be a Barton Foundation suit. He'd never seen one of those Serpents yet, but this thing didn't call to mind a snake. It had wings overlaying powerful vernier thrusters, which could have easily been built into the suit. The wings were a deliberate choice. So there was a fourth and possibly least desirable option. One of the Gundams. He'd never seen one before, but knew that they were colonists, part of the Barton Foundations elite shock troops come to wipe out everyone on Earth. What was left of everyone after the chunk of that colony hit the planet, anyway.

The suit wasn't in bad shape. He'd already noted there were no bullet holes that he could see. One of the lenses in its face was blown out, so the pilot probably lost visibility. That would've been an obvious set-back. Then he noticed the elbow joint hung at an odd angle. Not ripped away completely, but wires were definitely exposed, some hydraulic tubing snapped, too. He looked at the cockpit, stomach feeling a little empty. He wasn't afraid to die. There wasn't a whole lot to live for down here anyway. Living at this point was more like a force of habit, something to do, rather than a necessity. But when he looked at the cockpit and imagined a man on the other side, already holding a pistol at the ready to blow his brains out, he was suddenly rooted to the spot. If he opened the hatch, who would he be letting out? If he didn't open it, who would he be leaving to continue what work? And if the pilot was already dead in there and he abandoned the suit, who was he leaving it to?

He climbed up the arm of the suit. The machine was laid out on its side at an awkward angle, the shield arm thrust forward as if to protect itself from further damage, cradling the cockpit in its shadow. The shield dug into the ground, the machine's fist placed flush against the pavement, and he supposed a lot of the weight of the torso was placed there. The broken arm was closer to the ground, and that's the one he climbed. He hit the release at the neck to open the hatch, and he waited a moment before moving again, pistol trained on the point of air where the average height of a Colonial male's chest would be. He waited. They probably wore armored flight suits. Should he risk adjusting his sites? And waited. Aiming for the skull was riskier, a smaller target, and one he couldn't be as certain of. But how many chances would he get if the pilot came out shooting? And how many more breaths would he take here before moving? Nothing came out or even rustled quietly. Even the wind was absent.

Finally, he decided either the pilot was dead, unconscious, or forcing him to make the first move. It was obvious that he was present, so he may as well show himself. He lowered himself from the arm, walked beneath the shoulder joint, and moved into the line of sight of the cockpit.

The pilot was slumped forward against the harness. No armor in the flight suit. His head hung limp, dark hair in his face. Arms dangled loosely in the air. He moved a little more, trying to get a better look at the face to make sure the eyes were closed. He'd be lying if he said he wasn't surprised. The pilot was a kid, maybe about his age. Had he stolen the suit and attracted Alliance soldiers in the process? It was a possibility he hadn't thought of, that the suit belonged to the Alliance and had been captured. He was no stranger to child soldiers, having been one himself, but he knew official military organizations discouraged them. Or used to. Maybe times were just that desperate.

He got his hands on the edge of the hatch and hauled himself up. The pilot still didn't move. Briefly, he pulled off a glove and held a finger under the pilot's nose. He was still breathing. Pulling the glove back on, he looked the guy over for injuries, finally noting a bit of blood coursing over his cheek from his hairline. Must've suffered a blow to the head after some impact from another suit. Lucky timing, he decided, that the pilot managed to kill his opponents before passing out.

There was a handgun at the guy's hip, so he took it. A brief search yielded no other weapons. But when he felt over both of the pilot's legs, there was a knot on the left that was absent from the right. Further inspection revealed a large, ugly bump, not the explosive he'd been suspecting. Had the pilot broken his leg? No, that was impossible. He wouldn't have been piloting the suit if that was the case. That kind of pain would be unbearable, and certainly a handicap in a fight like this. Questions weren't going to be answered by observation right now, so he set them aside.

He went up on his toes and his fingers brushed the helmet that had fallen against the control panels on the pilot's left. He checked it over for any damage before sliding it over the pilot's head as best as he could. It wouldn't do an injured person any favors to breathe the air out here. The tubing from the rebreather stuck straight up from the pilot's shoulders, and he twisted them into place at the sides of the helmet. Securing his footholds, he placed his left shoulder under the pilot's chest and unbuckled the harness. The body fell hard, and he pressed his heels against the metal to keep them both upright. There was some hissing noise he couldn't place at first, and he thought maybe the pilot was jarred awake and in pain. Then he saw it, a thin jet of oxygen sending dust and ash dancing through the air. One of the tubes carrying clean air to the helmet had a puncture.

Glancing around for anything to use as a sealant got him nowhere, and he let a breath out through his nose. Then he muttered a little 'oh' to himself before taking a breath and peeling off his mask. He let his gum slip out into his hand, then spread it over the rift in the tube. The leak was plugged, the pilot was still unconscious, and he was ready to get out of here. After resealing his own mask, he got his arms around the guy's knees and put him over his shoulder. He wasn't all that heavy. And he knew it wasn't wise to move an injured person. But the pilot didn't have a lot of choice in the matter. Someone a lot more vicious could come along at any moment. Again he wondered who he was helping here, and if it would be so terrible to leave him to whatever would happen to him.

Then, maybe the pilot had some information. And he was just a kid, after all. Maybe he could be helpful in the end. Somehow.

His feet hit the ground and he let out a breath. The shock jolted through his legs and he looked around for any approaching strangers. The place was just as desolate as it had been since he got here. That weird suit was probably a nice prize to whoever found it. It was fortunate for him, then, that he was the first to do so. Climbing back into the cockpit, he went to work quickly, sabotaging the control panel and removing an essential component for starting the machine up. Most of the guts of the machine seemed to be analogous to the Leos and Aries he was so familiar with and that made things easier. It'd require a transport to move now, so it bought him some time to get the pilot back to his home before returning for the suit. Part of him wondered if it was really so wise to keep it for himself. If this kid was the real pilot, he'd probably want it back. That was fine enough, if he could figure out what the pilot intended to do with it. And if he wasn't, whoever owned it would probably take it by force.

It was something he needed to work out. Maybe he could end up bartering with whoever it belonged to. A suit like this had to be worth a lot of food and water. And if he _had_ taken it from someone who stole it, its real owner would be indebted to him. Right?

He ran with that rationalization as he rushed back home with an unconscious body in tow.

* * *

When he woke, he didn't open his eyes. He let his body tell him what was wrong. Ankles were solid. Left leg broken but he could feel something stiff set on either side of it, wrapped in place. So someone else was here. Other leg was okay. Knees aching but fine. Right wrist strained but unbroken. Left wrist was fine. Neck stiff. Head ached. Nothing sharply painful in the way of puncture wounds. No bullets either. His own gun was missing, and his rebreather was gone from his back. He listened intently, gauging his surroundings. What the hell was that whistling noise? It would go on for a few seconds, stop, then repeat the same exact way again. A code, maybe. Was someone trying to communicate with him? Or someone else in the area? He listened intently, studying the whistling for a pattern he recognized.

Something fluttered overhead and his eyes snapped open, catching something brown dart just out of the edge of his vision. He looked for it, but couldn't find it, instead distracted by the room. He was in a bed. The sheets were fairly clean. The light was low and he wasn't sure if that was because he'd been unconscious and whoever put him here was aware he'd probably have a headache when he woke, or if there just weren't more lights available. The next thing he noticed were all of the plants. Some did better than others, but he recognized a few as food. Lettuce and celery were growing in jars of clean water. One looked like it wanted to be a tomato someday but didn't quite have what it needed to make it. Another was some yellow pepper that was barely the size of his own thumbnail, even though it looked ripe. Others just looked like grasses or succulents. There was a stack of books in the corner. Most were in Cyrillic and he could only decipher the contents based on pictures of plants on the spines or covers. The few in English were about growing herbs, plants for air purification, and even one about maintaining apiaries. A couple of Russian/English dictionaries were set on top of those.

That whistling noise came again, this time from outside of the room. He glanced that direction, but it wasn't helpful. He couldn't see anyone around the corner. But there was a dog in the doorway. A large one. It sat placidly, for now, watching him with upturned eyes, head on its paws. He had no doubts it'd be a lot less calm if he stood up, so that was going to be an issue.

Movement on the floor caught his attention and he let his eyes follow it. He wasn't sure if it was disbelief or shock that lit his eyes right now. But there was a turtle, a grumpy, angry looking old thing, and part of its shell looked smeared over with plaster of some sort. It scooted across the floor, and when he leaned in a little as if to verify it really existed and wasn't just a product of the blow to the head he'd suffered, it opened its mouth and made a hissing noise at him.

He ignored it, and started putting on his shoes. He pulled on one boot, but when he touched the second, something moved inside of it. A head peaked out and he couldn't suppress a startled grunt before he threw the whole thing at the wall. A brown snake slithered out, and he let loose a sharp exhalation. He'd known that Earth was full of dangerous animals, but he didn't know he'd be waking up with them in his shoes. What kind of maniac had taken him hostage and left snakes and dogs and turtles to keep him in place?

He took off his first shoe and held it tightly, ready to crush the thing's skull before it could bite him. The dog raised its head and made a sort of low whining sound. He refocused on his target as it slithered towards the opposite wall. An exclamation in Russian caught his attention and he looked up immediately. "Stop, put that down!" The thickly accented voice belonged to a guy about his own age, with green eyes showing a little too much anger for his liking.

Heero ignored his captor and launched the shoe at the snake. At about the same time, the other guy snatched up the nasty monster and clutched it to his chest like it was his only child. The shoe bounced harmlessly off the floor, landing on its side next to the books. "What did she ever do to you?"

"They bite."

"She is not venomous snahkye."

"What?"

The guy held the snake up again, and said, "She's a snahkye."

"Snake," Heero corrected, realizing what he was trying to say.

Embarrassment didn't seem to cross the other guy's mind and instead he repeated it the way Heero said it. " _Snake_. Oh. I never have heard it said in English."

Heero didn't care one way or the other, watching with a bit of disgust as the brown snake wrapped its way up the guy's arm before he set it on the ground. He didn't have all day to look at this lunatic's petting zoo, so he cut right to the chase. "You OZ?"

"No."

"Alliance?"

"No."

"Sympathetic to the Bartons?"

"No."

"Do you know who I am?"

The other guy shook his head. "I found your suit. Some miles from here. It has some damage but I may have enough parts to help you fix it."

Doubtful, but he didn't press the issue. He could fix it on his own, anyway. "Where is it?"

"Across the street. Old parking garage. Out of sight."

Heero nodded his understanding but said nothing else as he stood up, weight in his right leg. The guy backed away from him, and it didn't bother Heero. If anything, they were good instincts to have. He swept up his shoes, now certifiably snake free.

"What is that suit?"

"It's better if you don't know."

The guy held his cards pretty close to the chest, and Heero was having difficulty gauging his reactions. Unless, it seemed, he put a snake in harms' way. "You're a Gundam pilot, aren't you?"

Heero tensed. Obviously he'd given himself away when asking who the guy might be affiliated with. He didn't need his gun to kill this guy, but it would've made things simpler, especially with his broken leg. He bolted, but knew he wasn't able to move as fast as he normally could, the pain screaming in his leg seeing to that. And the other teen reacted quickly, unexpectedly so, dropping low and shoving a shoulder into Heero's chest. He felt his feet leave the ground before his back hit it seconds later, pain radiating through his leg all over again. Before he could right himself, he felt a heavy weight on his chest and a knee against each of his arms. Then there was the gun in his face. The kid did all this without much expression, as if this were just as normal a day as any. And maybe that's how things were on Earth now. For lone stragglers like this one, scattered in barely habitable areas, supplies and food would be hard to come by. Definitely not enough to share. He tried not to think about the sorts of encounters such situations lead to, but a voice in the back of his head mocked him with dark scenarios he'd failed to prevent.

"I don't know if I want to kill you yet," the teen said, again without any tone to indicate more than the plainly stated words.

"Lukewarm's no good," Heero responded. Something Duo always said that actually struck him as sensible for once. If he was going to die he'd rather get it over with. Maybe it was some kind of justice if somebody from Earth was going to pull the trigger.

"Neither is making decisions without as much information as you can get."

"What do you want?"

"Why did you want to destroy the planet?" That was the question Heero waited for every time he was around people here. No one ever asked, because no one in refugee camps or supply stations knew who he was.

"You can't believe everything you hear," Heero answered. He knew it was one of the few things OZ and the Alliance agreed on. That the five Gundam pilots committed genocide against nine billion people. Killing four point six billion. Leaving the rest to languish in barely survivable conditions that would end even more lives soon enough. Heero also knew the truth of the matter, a truth the two military powers didn't want getting out.

"And if I should believe anyone it would be you?"

"So shoot me already. If you aren't going to believe what I have to say, what's the point of any of this?" Heero said. The boy studied him for the space of a few seconds after that. Heero wasn't particularly good with reading subtle facial expressions, and his captor here took subtle to an entirely different level. But it was plain to him he was thinking about something. Something was keeping him rooted to the spot for a moment.

Then the pressure in his arms was gone and in a fluid movement, the guy was on his feet, gun still leveled at Heero's chest. "Then talk."

Heero sat up and glanced at the door. The dog looked back, ears forward, like it was waiting for things to escalate further. This boy had already shown that he had quick reactions, sharp instincts for conflict, and a lack of trepidation over killing a person. It was like looking in a mirror. His hesitation didn't stem from being afraid to end a life, but something different. Heero knew that running would probably get him a bullet buried in a kneecap, maybe a vital organ. And with his leg damaged, he probably wouldn't be outrunning the other, taller guy anyway. So he sat. And maybe a kid from Earth was owed an explanation, anyway. Had anyone else given one to him, and would they ever if Heero didn't now? His whole life was ruined, his whole planet ruined, so didn't Heero owe him, and every single person left on Earth, some kind of answer?

"Gundam pilot," he said, confirming the suspicion. "There are five of us. And four of us refused the order to drop the colony. You'll never hear about that, because it's easiest to fight wars when the issues are black and white. When the enemies aren't people but caricatures of evil. Four of us tried everything we could to destroy the colony before it hit the Earth." He stopped a moment, remembering the way Duo's voice rose frantically the closer that chunk of metal got to the Earth. The way Wufei's breathing became more and more erratic as he pushed himself beyond his limits to move his suit quicker and harder. Quatre's stunned silence. "They knew we were out there. OZ and Alliance. They were there too, doing what they could. But we couldn't stop it."

The other boy seemed to be considering Heero's story, at least. So there was something. No outright accusations of lying. "The fifth one?" he asked. "You said there were five."

"The Barton Foundation financed the Gundams. They dropped the colony. Dekim Barton, the head of the foundation, this is all his plan to make the Earth dependent on the colonies. To eradicate OZ and the Alliance and leave a power vacuum for him to conveniently fill. His grandson Trowa pilots the fifth suit. He's the one who wanted to see this through. He did everything he could to keep us from preventing it, him and the Serpents."

"Why are you here then, if not to kill us?"

"The four of us target OZ bases."

"Those were Alliance troops back there where I pulled you from."

"They attacked me. I'm their enemy, but they're only mine if they engage me. OZ is the main target."

"Why? Have you seen this planet? What little they have in their control is dying. Give it time. We'll all be dead soon."

Heero looked up at him and tilted his head a little. But then maybe it wasn't so strange that someone out here could be unaware of what was going on in the world. "Not everything on the planet is like this. There are more livable places. Imperfect, but they're better off than this. OZ has a stronger grip on them, since they have control of almost all remaining resources."

"We have much bigger problems now than the military being less than kind. Even if there are better places, most of the Earth isn't this way. So much farmland is lost, people will start starving. If they haven't already. Medicine will be harder to come by. Desperate people do violent things."

"Like you?"

"I'm not desperate. I know this. I've always known this way of living. But not everyone does so it will be harder for them."

"You're a soldier." Heero didn't say it as a question because it wasn't one.

"Mercenary. As long as I can remember. I know how to make a living out of the bare minimum."

That image in the mirror was getting sharper. Enough like himself to be understandable. Heero glanced around the room at the evidence of that. He heard that whistle again and his eyes shot in the direction it'd come from, out in the hall. "Who else is here?"

"Just me."

"Then who keeps whistling?"

The other boy stared for a moment, still giving nothing away. Then he said, "It's a bird. You've never heard a bird?"

Heero shook his head. He knew what they looked like, same as the turtle and the snake. But he'd never seen or heard a live one. "There aren't birds on the colonies." Everything there was allotted and purposeful. Every tree planted, every patch of sod laid, every brick in every building and every steel beam had a purpose. Nothing wasted, nothing extra, nothing random or unpredictable. In space, unpredictable meant disaster, plain and simple. Birds weren't a necessity there and it wouldn't do to have them attacking delivery drones or nesting in the wiring.

"Maybe I see why that Dekim is so jealous of the Earth, then," the boy muttered. It was the first time Heero heard his voice give away some of what he was feeling, save for the brief worried anger over the snake-complete and utter disgust.

"What's your name?" Heero asked abruptly.

Nothing being easy in life, the other boy shrugged.

"If you're going to help fix my suit, I've got to call you something." Someone who didn't want to kill him was a pretty rare thing, and he'd learned from the other pilots that letting someone help you out of a tough spot wasn't so awful a thing. The spaceport he was after was days away, and his suit had issues. He could fix it all alone, but another set of hands would repair it quicker.

"They called me Nimeta. The mercenaries."

"Why didn't you say that to begin with?"

"It just means 'without a name' in Estonian."

Heero let out an annoyed breath through his nose. A boy soldier without a name. Too many parallels for his comfort, but then why should he have ever believed he was so unique in times as desperate as these? "Then I'll call you Nanashi."

"Why?"

"Same thing in Japanese. Because I'm not Estonian."

Nanashi nodded. "And you?"

It felt heavy on his tongue and he almost didn't want to say it. What a mockery the code name had turned out to be, but maybe that was the point. "Heero Yuy."

* * *

"Lukewarm is no good" is something said by Roald Dahl. I don't know where Duo picked this up. I do not exactly think Trowa is ethnically Russian so you can have him be whatever you want in your mind's eye. But since Episode Zero I always got a Russian/Eastern Europe vibe from his mercenary group, maybe because they look dressed for the cold(I know it's a flimsy reason). So I have the thought that the mercenaries were a mix Eastern Europeans, most of whom were Russian. An Estonian found Trowa and when asked for his name, the Estonian tells the others 'nimeta'-to say, he doesn't have one. The Russian captain mistakes that for a name and even after they realise the mistake, they keep calling him this way. It's purely self-indulgent, I like how it sounds better than in Russian. :p This story is not intended to be a romantic one but if it pleases you to read it this way, that's fine too.


	2. Chapter 2

Nanashi decided his new not-name was didn't bother him. Maybe it was just another way of saying he didn't have a name, but it outranked most things he'd been called in his short life, competitors being 'nobody', 'empty', and 'inhuman'. So he'd take it. And the guy who'd given it to him was something, too. Contrary to his more realistic assumption, Heero _had_ piloted his Gundam with a broken leg-somehow the only injury he'd received when leaping out of the sixteenth floor of an Alliance base he'd apparently wiped intel from. That wasn't any small pain to fight through, so it was particularly awe-inspiring. Or maybe insane, if Nanashi had been raised in a different environment. As it stood, he felt somehow even more insignificant next to this guy. A real soldier, not like the pampered elite of OZ, but not like himself and other mercenaries-"mongrels and mutts fighting over whatever table scraps were tossed at them," as a member of said pampered elite had once described them. Heero was like the distilled essence of war, bottled up in the shape of something human. Nanashi thought maybe if he studied the guy hard enough, copied his movements, mimicked his mannerisms-

No, that was ridiculous. He doubted there were any people in all of Earth and space who could truly match what Heero was anyway. Beyond that, the pilot would be leaving as soon as his suit was fixed, back out into space to meet his comrades and keep fighting in what may go down as the most important war in all of human history. Nanashi would still be here, plotting his way southward. A strategy that was taking months when it shouldn't have. Most people would probably be tempted to stay here, anyway. He'd coaxed some small amount of food into growing. He'd collected those handful of animals, though he never quite understood why. He had these books to help teach himself whatever was necessary to survive-this time it was only a little less guns and mechanics, but a lot more home agriculture and composting. He had an okay source of income, scrapping useful parts from suits or vehicles and trading them with whichever military power would take them. Both had bases within a day or two of biking, outposts too insignificant in the overall scheme of things to waste precious resources sniping at each other to determine who got to lay claim to this wasteland. They fought each other for the more valuable real estate in other parts of the globe. It didn't matter to him which one paid him, OZ or Alliance. A can of food or a bag of jerky was edible. Pride and principles weren't.

With all that he had going for him given the circumstances, he wasn't used to calling one single place a home. The urge to move on was calling him, had been for some time, but it wasn't so simple. There were a lot of variables to juggle. Russia was enormous, and the countries southward weren't much smaller. There'd be long days of walking between cities, meaning pitching a tent, sleeping in a gas mask wherever there was still ash in the air, and just kind of hoping nothing too hungry came across him. Then there was food. He had to trust to the idea that he'd just happen upon some more along his trip to an uncertain destination, but that wasn't wise. Starvation was a very real possibility. He'd thought several times of stowing in one of the planes that came in and out of the nearby bases every month, but always stopped himself. Being caught could land him in a prison. Maybe even killed, if anybody thought to accuse him of working for the Bartons or the Alliance. And that scenario didn't seem too far-fetched to him, given the paranoid climate.

Moving on didn't matter right now. The next few days would be taken up by this Gundam pilot. It wasn't a bother. Heero kept mostly to himself, and wasn't the perpetually violent, havoc-wreaking monster the military had painted him as. Nanashi almost expected sharp teeth and claws. He still wasn't sure about Heero's story, if he and the other few pilots really tried to prevent the colony from dropping, or if he was trying to look sympathetic when faced with the barrel of a gun. But what did it matter at this point? What was done was done, and it didn't take an observant person to see the guilt in Heero's eyes when he told the story. Or for one to notice that he still held onto some kind of hope that it could all be made right. He insisted the Alliance, with its formerly more pacifist leanings in the past few years, could be reformed. They could broker some peace between Earth and the colonies, if the extremist Bartons could be scrubbed from space and if OZ could be beaten back.

Nanashi was a bit more doubtful. Since the drop, the Alliance spoke less of peace and negotiation and more about revenge and retribution. People were animals, much as they liked to forget, so most of them acted on their instinct to bite at what pained them. OZ had been picking up-or picking _off_ , when met with resistance-Alliance squadrons left and right, too, taking a more insidious path to world domination. It was a pathetic fight over a dying planet, but OZ was determined to be the one to lord over the Earth's corpse. Heero insisted, though, with the right leader, the Alliance could be turned into something better, dedicated to peace and recovery. Most colonists weren't happy about what happened, evidenced by humanitarian aid projects and many opening their doors to refugees, so he figured there was some common ground between Earth and Space in the wake of the disaster. Nanashi left off that such a mass immigration to the colonies was probably what the Bartons would want-more people eating out of their hands rather than OZ's. Instead he asked which leader was this mythical 'right' one. He was met only with a thoughtful silence and a shrug.

Heero had wanted to start work on his suit immediately after their initial conversation, and Nanashi wasn't really in a position to argue. It wasn't his machine, after all. He'd first offered to fix it to test the waters, to try to get the other to reveal more of who he was, what he was affiliated with. He'd come very close to killing him when he figured out Heero was a gundam pilot. Something stopped him. Maybe it was the guilt that clouded the edges of Heero's eyes when he spoke about the Earth. Nanashi didn't prod him about it. If Heero really was trying to pave the way for a more peaceful future, it was better to let him try, even if he didn't think such a future was really possible. Not much worse could be done to the planet at this point, anyway.

He agreed to lead Heero to the garage where he kept the suit. It was the only place underground that was large enough to house the thing, to keep it out of sight of any more of the reconnaissance fly-overs. Obviously OZ learned that the gundam was in the area, probably by monitoring Alliance chatter, or even a spike in an energy reading. They didn't have a lot of time to get this thing fixed before ground troops started coming around.

The makeshift hangar was the second basement-level of a parking garage. He used it to store MS and vehicle parts, most of them useless but kept just in case they were necessary for supplementing a more valuable piece of equipment. This place was basically his livelihood right now, so he tried his best to keep it secure from any drifters who'd recognize the value of some of the parts if they wandered in here. It'd taken nearly a whole day to find every entrance to try to secure them. He kept the entrances for vehicles shuttered. The doors were fixed with a couple useful things. One was something he'd basically put together from a prank kit intended for children. It was supposed to do things like change television channels, or mess with people's computers. He attempted to modify it to send soldiers' hazard suits a false positive on radiation readings. He didn't have a suit of his own to test it with and just sort of hoped it was working. The second device sent him a notification if the doors were opened, and so far that hadn't happened. In the weeks after the colony dropped, a lot of people had passed through the city on their way to one of the refugee camps in Seoul. The number of wanderers had dropped significantly, and left him feeling like the lengths he went to with the garage were a little ridiculous now.

He looked up when he heard a little trilling noise from behind him, and Heero's voice came slightly muffled by his helmet: "The place is irradiated."

So the toy store security actually worked. There were plenty of places on Earth that had become radioactive wastelands in the wake of the impact. Irkutsk wasn't one of them, but most people probably wouldn't think twice if they got a high reading. "It's only a security measure. To keep people out. When there _were_ people to keep out."

"What happened to them?" Heero asked, and it almost sounded as if he didn't actually want to hear the answer but was forcing himself to listen.

Nanashi pulled open the door to the stairwell, and about three seconds later, the cracked and worn phone in his pocket buzzed. So that still worked, too. "They were all moving through here to Seoul."

Heero nodded. "That's where I'm headed, once Zero is repaired." Their footsteps echoed noisily as they made it down the stairs to the lowest level.

"It's called Zero?" Nanashi asked, pushing open the last door. Another buzz from the phone. He looked at the suit in question, still laying on the MS carrier. It gleamed white under the dim lights suspended from the ceiling.

"Wing Zero," Heero amended as he stepped closer to the suit. He suppressed a wince as he pulled himself up onto the bed of the carrier. Frayed wires and hydraulic cables jutted out from the elbow joint. He remembered the hazy scene, how the pain from his broken leg seemed to almost choke him, then the cockpit shuddering on impact from the Leo. He'd shoved the beam saber through that last suit, hit his head hard against the edge of a control panel, and passed out. It felt foolish and weak to be taken down like that. He was supposed to be better prepared than that.

Nanashi inspected the suit's face as Heero looked over the arm. He briefly let himself dwell on the acidic thought that even _machines_ had names and he didn't, but it passed quickly. Carefully, he continued assessing the damage to the camera. "You have no visibility now?"

"None, last that I remember." It'd been shot out just before that Leo lunged for him.

Nanashi kept a mental catalog of the damaged parts and what would be needed to fix it. "I have plenty of wire, and some parts for the camera." The heads of Leos and Aries were rarely damaged in battle. Good pilots didn't waste ammunition on trick shots they might not sink, and the heads were much smaller targets than the chests. "But it won't be perfect match for the other eye. May cause problems if you have a 3D display. And I don't have anything to place over the camera, so this may give you a bad image when the wind hits it."

"I just need the bare minimum until I make it to Seoul. I can repair it further in space."

"Okay." He'd spent the rest of they day sifting through all his parts, looking for whatever would best work for the gundam. It had its differences from the normal suits, but if Heero just needed the bare minimum as he claimed, then these would do. He tried to tell Heero to stay back and keep off his broken leg, but the other wouldn't listen. Nanashi didn't fight it. Heero was too focused on his next step in the war to give himself time to rest, and right now that meant picking through heaps of scrap metal with some guy he barely knew. The fight with the Alliance slowed him down more than he liked, and he had to make up for lost time.

The first night was spent mostly in silence. Nanashi gave him the bed because of his leg, and he was used to sleeping on the ground anyway. Their only conversation was brief. Heero's eyes settled on the plants on the shelf, and he asked, "Did you really grow those plants?"

Nanashi nodded.

Heero continued to study the plants until he finally said, "I wonder what that's like." Nanashi didn't understand what he meant, but Heero didn't elaborate so he didn't ask. The rest of the night was mostly silent, save for the occasional twitter of the bird.

They spent much of the second day in the garage. While it was dusty and the air was stale, it was still well-sealed enough for them to work without masks. Heero thought they were making pretty good time on the repairs given the limited resources. Faster than he would've managed alone and while injured, definitely. He'd seriously doubted Nanashi's proficiency with the mechanics of a suit, especially one he'd be so unfamiliar with. But he was more observant than Heero gave him credit for over the differences between a gundam and a more basic suit.

And even the dog helped.

When Heero first heard Nanashi say something in Russian, he'd assumed he was speaking to himself. Duo did this all the time. Constantly. Forever. So Heero had gotten plenty of practice in ignoring someone who wasn't really speaking to him. When he looked up, he saw Nanashi didn't share Duo's habit of talking to no one. The dog sat obediently on Zero's neck with a flashlight in his mouth, keeping perfectly still as it illuminated the broken eye while Nanashi worked on it. If Heero knew much about fairy tales, he might have had the presence of mind to make some kind of remark about a lone individual whose only friend was a helpful animal. But it was really more Duo's territory, and he wasn't around, so Heero just snorted to himself and went back to cutting wire. He supposed it made sense that someone who lived completely alone found an extra pair of hands whatever way they could. Or extra pair of jaws, in this instance.

The camera was fixed by the end of the day. As fixed as it could be, given the situation. Nanashi had been right that the image was a little fuzzy, but at least there _was_ an image at all. The arm would take a little longer to work on but he'd probably be gone within a few days, barring any complications. When he tested the cameras, he sent off a message to Quatre, informing him of the delay. Even after months of working with the others as a slightly more organized group, it still felt odd to answer to someone who wasn't J. Quatre wasn't so bad though.

That night's meal was a couple celery stalks and half a can of tuna. Heero was never picky about food. A calorie was a calorie, no matter how it tasted. It wasn't a particularly filling dinner, but he couldn't complain. Resources were obviously scarce, and the fact that Nanashi was sharing anything was a boon in itself. The dog was the only one with plenty of food and he supposed that made sense. Nanashi wasn't desperate enough to start eating pet food yet, and Heero figured that was the sort of item people wouldn't have swept off the shelves of stores in the initial hunt for food.

His attention was suddenly drawn to an object flying at him and he snatched it out of the air before it landed by his thigh. Packet of crackers. He glanced over at Nanashi and saw he had chosen to share his with the brown rat-or mouse? Heero couldn't tell the difference-sitting on his shoulder. It held a small crumb between its tiny pink claws and nibbled away, not a care in the world. This whole place was ridiculous. Heero liked dogs, but he didn't understand how the guy let mice and snakes hang off him like that. He counted the crackers left in the packet, compared his six with Nanashi's four, and said, "I think you miscounted-"

Nanashi just shook his head, still lost in thought. Heero half-wondered if he'd even processed what he'd said, but kept the crackers anyway. He looked over at all those plants again, a million stupid questions coming to mind. They were just food, nothing else about them mattered, so he tried to suppress such irrelevant curiosities. Edible ones seemed harder to grow, but the fact that anything still grew here was impressive. So much was gone in the blink of an eye. And he knew the Earth would recover, one day. But it wouldn't be anything like before, and people might not be around to see it.

"Do you really keep bees?" he asked as his eyes found that stack of books again. He had just about everything in the small room memorized by this point. There wasn't much to it. Food. Books to tell one how to grow the food. Some clothes. He hadn't seen any beehives, but hell if he was about to continue assuming things about this guy.

"No. But if I found any, I'd maybe know what to do. If I can figure how to read it." He nodded back to the book he knew Heero was talking about.

"You can't read English?" Heero asked.

Nanashi shook his head. "Not much."

Heero nodded, remembering Nanashi's bungling of the word 'snake' the day before. "How'd you learn to speak it?"

"Some from the mercenaries. Some more from audio lessons." He gestured to the desk with the plants where a pair of headphones lay. "Even more from trading with Alliance and OZ."

Heero nodded. There was another brief silence before the bird sang again. More questions, more curiosity that Heero wasn't supposed to entertain. His jaw tensed for a brief second as he thought back to harsh lessons learned from Dekim, the man who'd done everything he could to drive the humanity out of him. So maybe he should think of the questions as less useless and more defiant, even if the man wasn't here to hear him ask them. Sure. That's how Duo would probably spin it. Of course, if he were here, Heero wouldn't have to be the one to ask questions because Duo would ask every single one possible. "Where'd you get all the animals?"

"Rodya was mine before the colony fell." The dog's ears twitched at the sound of his name. "The turtle, I think someone may have been trying to eat it. The shell was broken. So I tried to fix it. The mouse was here in this cellar before me, and I did not think it was fair to tell her to leave." Heero snorted at that and Nanashi glanced up before finishing. "The snake I found in the garage. The bird, I found the egg on the ground so I-" he stopped, like he was looking for a word, but couldn't find it, "-I broke it here."

"Hatched it," Heero said. Eggs hatch. He'd learned that somewhere, that fuzzy period of time he could barely remember of some kind woman whose face he didn't know anymore. Not the sort of information that mattered to a soldier, child or otherwise, so he knew he wouldn't have learned it through his training.

"Hatched," Nanashi repeated, as if cementing the word in his brain. Its similarity to another word took his mind in a different direction, and he asked, "When you were given the gundam, did you know what you would use it for?"

"No," Heero said, not bothering to tell him he wasn't 'given' the gundam. _He_ was the one given to _it._ "The ones who created them thought they'd be revolutionary tools. A tangible message to send to the Earth that the colonists wanted their freedom. Genocide wasn't their goal, and it was never mine either."

There was another round of silence and Heero noticed that they were never awkward ones, as could happen with Duo and Quatre sometimes. He was still only just getting used to working with others. After they all tried and failed to stop the colony, he'd felt lost. Wandering aimlessly, taking on whatever mission came down the pipeline to make himself feel like he was really fixing what he'd broken, whether he was or not. Only Duo and Quatre had stayed together after the drop, and somehow he and Wufei kept getting drawn back to the pair over and over until they both finally admitted to themselves that they needed the others. Wufei took the longest, and still seemed as if he didn't-or maybe couldn't-completely trust them. Heero didn't blame him for that. He knew Wufei carried maybe the heaviest burden out of all of them. It was his colony that hit the planet, and he'd said something about how he wouldn't be absolved until OZ and the Bartons were completely destroyed. Maybe not even then.

"It flies?" Nanashi asked suddenly, pulling Heero from his thoughts.

He didn't have to ask what he was referring to. "Yeah."

Nanashi moved the tuna around its can with his fork. "Is it-" Here he looked up for the briefest of seconds before his eyes fell back down to his food and Heero thought it was a sign of uncertainty. "Do you like flying?"

He never thought about it. It was a function of the suit, nothing more. An advantage in a battle with the ground-based Leos. Necessity against the Aries and Taurus. And it's just how things worked in space. Flight was normal to him, so it was a bit like being asked if he enjoyed walking, or even breathing. "I don't know," he answered finally.

Nanashi didn't press the issue. "I never have flown before," he said. He didn't know what compelled him to admit that. Flight struck him as something almost fantastical. People weren't born with feathers and hollow bones, after all, so what were they doing in the sky? And maybe, a small part of him wanted to know, what did he have to do to get up there too? He kept his eyes on his food. Maybe it was foolish to tell someone from space he'd never gotten his feet off the ground. And maybe it was foolish, too, to have wanted something and never done anything to get it.

* * *

"Sir!"

The barked greeting made it to General Treize Khushrenada's ears over the dying engines of the jet. The skies still rained ash here from the near constant fires in the north. Every grain he saw flutter down like some kind of hellish snowflake was another stab in the heart. The once beautiful Earth was dying, and all those dedicated enough to stay at her side were likely to perish with her. It wasn't something they admitted to the people. There was enough panic without that fact. But there simply weren't enough resources to go around in the near future. Not enough clean air to breathe. Water that hadn't turned to poison from acid rain. Farmland that hadn't turned sterile. Long term prospects were just that- _long_ term, and even as they devised plans for the construction of green houses and controlled agricultural environments, many more would be dead before it even began.

Treize once believed the way to real peace was to start a war so horrifying that no one could possibly keep the will to fight. Now that war was here and it only made people want to fight all the more. To get revenge, to feel useful in the face of so much destruction, to kill the man and his followers who could conceive, let alone follow through, with one of the most horrific acts of violence in the history of humankind. So had he been wrong? War now was not simply a choice in an effort to bring a lasting peace. It was the only option the Earth had left.

Inside, the air was breathable and clean, the building made to withstand various potential disasters, and he took off his mask. He didn't know if the base would still be standing if the colony had impacted farther east. All the ones in Europe were obliterated, the whole continent uninhabitable, and the one in the outskirts of Moscow had taken substantial structural damage. As far as locations in the Northern hemisphere went, the base outside Irkutsk was one of six remaining to them. It was in the middle of a wasteland, and usually, little of significance happened here. But it paid to keep eyes and ears wherever they could.

"General Treize sir," came another greeting and salute. He smiled as he met the ever-intense gaze of Colonel Une. She'd been closer when news of 01's attack on the Alliance outpost came through, and rushed to the base in an effort to find the gundam before it disappeared again. For him, any matter involving a gundam pilot was important enough to warrant a personal visit. "We've monitored Alliance communications, and have been able to pinpoint Zero One's last known point of contact with their military."

"Excellent." The gundams were going to be essential in taking down the Barton Foundation. Treize knew the sentiment of discontent was already there. He'd witnessed two of them personally battle Barton's grandson and volunteered his squadron to their aid in hopes of winning them over. But the pilots, rather than concentrate their efforts on a single enemy, continued to target both the Bartons and OZ. If OZ and the Gundams could unite, they'd be a formidable enough force to change the tide of the battle. Until that day came, he'd continue to paint them as the enemies of the people. Earth's populace was more suggestible now than ever, and it was easy enough to convince them that OZ was their last hope for protection from terrorist threats. If the truth got out, and the gundams stepped in to fill that role, OZ would lose what little hold they had left.

So if a gundam pilot was found today, he wanted to be there to speak with him personally.

Treize followed Une into a debriefing room. There were one or two officers he recognized, most others unknown to him. This outpost was not a position given to his more favored subordinates. But it was a necessary one. Often the gundams kept to the less inhabitable corners of the planet, forcing OZ into dangerous territory. And of course, they wanted to avoid populated settlements to prevent civilian deaths in the crossfire. The propaganda machine spun this as cowardice instead of the concern for innocent human life it really was.

Curt greetings were exchanged before Treize nodded for them to begin. The room darkened for a moment, then was lit with the soft blue glow of a map projected on the wall. "The Alliance engaged with Zero One at about 0400 hours local time, roughly sixty kilometers north of Irkutsk, here." A red mark appeared on the map, marking the start of the battle. "Reports indicate that all Alliance soldiers were killed in the battle. It's also believed the pilot suffered injuries in his escape from the Alliance base. By 1300 hours we had a team sent to sweep the area where the battle is believed to have ended, here." Another mark indicated an area inside the city proper. "Reconnaissance confirms that the battle took place, but Zero One was not present at the time of the flyover. However, closer inspection revealed fresh motor oil on the asphalt at the site, indicating that an MS transport may have been driven to the area. Deceased Alliance pilots were also found to be missing standard issue pistols, so either the injured pilot left his suit, stole the weapons from the dead soldiers-a first for a gundam pilot as far as we know-knew exactly where to find a transport with fuel, and returned to the site for his suit. Or a third party was present We are uncertain as to where the suit has been taken, but it couldn't be far as further investigations revealed no signs of any transports on the roads in the past twenty-four hours. There is a known salvage contact in this area and we are awaiting your orders on whether or not to dispatch a pair of officers to his location in order to gather possible information regarding the suit."

"What information do you have on the contact?" Treize asked, studying the map. There were people like this scattered throughout the globe. Either too stubborn to leave their homes, or simply incapable of doing so. In the long months since the colony dropped, it would only be more difficult to leave as roads degraded and resources became more scarce. Many of these people turned to bartering what useful non-edible material they could find with nearby military outposts. Some of them were utterly insane from the isolation and the horror of what had happened to the planet. Others were supporting some family member too weak or injured to make it out to more populated settlements. But they still always had to be cautious in dealings with civilians. There was the simple fact that not everyone on the planet was fond of them. Shoddy parts installed in mobile suits could easily result in the deaths of pilots.

Treize noticed the lieutenant's sudden discomfort as he responded, "Not much, sir."

"You must have some information. UIN. Nationality. Political leanings. A name." Treize said the last as a bit of a joke, as though it was obvious they'd have recorded the man's name.

But the lieutenant's brows drew together again and he slowly shook his head. "He said he doesn't have a name, sir."

Une looked to the lieutenant sharply, asking in a low voice, "It never crossed your mind they may be a spy for the Alliance, sabotaging your suits and surveying your base?"

"Of course, ma'am, but as a consequence of his unverifiable identity, we never allowed him on base-"

"If he's good, he doesn't _need_ to be on base to sabotage it," Une responded, voice rising slightly at the lieutenant's disregard for the safety and security of the facility. "He only needs a fool like you to accept broken or bugged MS parts."

"We just don't have enough contacts here to be choosy about-"

Treize held up a hand before the argument could continue. It was pointless at this juncture to fight over whether or not the individual had scammed them or was spying on them as they spoke. "It'd be best if you ran a thorough check on all parts he's supplied you which are currently installed in suits or vehicles."

"Yes, sir."

"Do you know where he lives then?" Treize asked as he looked back over the map on the wall.

"Yes, sir. Several kilometers from where Zero One was believed to have been."

"I'd like him brought to base."

The lieutenant exchanged wary glances with some of the other officers in the room. "May I ask why, sir? We can easily interrogate him on the field if you give us leave to send out some officers. But we're fairly certain he doesn't have any affiliation with anyone that would pose a risk to us."

"I'm curious as to how you know that when you can't even tell me the man's name." Treize was careful to inflect just enough weight into the statement to leave them wondering if it was a casual, off-hand comment or complete disappointment. The soldiers at this outpost were always eager to please in the event it may mean a promotion to a better location. So he kept them on their toes and none of them argued the point further. Maybe they had taken the basic steps involved in holding a civilian supplier at arms' length. Treize was intrigued by someone who didn't have an ID number to give them but had plenty of business to do. Even more so if such a man may have come in contact with Zero One's pilot. "Dispatch your soldiers and have them escort the man here."

* * *

I am sorry for these sloggy type chapters. Things will pick up soon, and we meet the other pilots in part 5 or 6. Also I see that things have changed in Gundam Wing since I was like ten. I thought it used to be that Heero's name was just a codename and that he was raised from birth as a soldier without a real one. So when Heero made the comparison between himself and Trowa for being nameless soldiers, I didn't know this new information of him having known his mother. One final note...has anyone noticed the 'homage' in this story yet? It has to do with Nanashi's role. :)) Thanks for reading.


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